HOW AMERICA´S CIVIL WAR CHANGED THE WORLD / THE WALL STREET JOURNAL OP EDITORIAL ( RECOMMENDED READING )

OPINION
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APRIL 9, 2011.
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How America's Civil War Changed the World
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Imagine how the last 150 years would have been different had the North not freed the slaves and saved the Union.
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By FERGUS M. BORDEWICH

On April 12, 1861, a shell fired from a rebel battery on Johnson's Island in Charleston harbor burst over Fort Sumter, touching off the Civil War. Answering the South Carolina secession convention's call to join it in "a great Slaveholding Confederacy, stretching its arms over a territory larger than any power in Europe possesses," 11 slave-holding states soon withdrew from the Union to form the Confederate States of America. Armies fought over now-famous battlefields from Bull Run to Petersburg in a seesaw contest that would ultimately claim 620,000 American lives before coming to an end at Appomattox, Va., in 1865.


Remembering the past is vital to any nation's identity. And the Civil War was an epic struggle in our history, whether measured by the numbers involved, the human and financial cost, the vast area fought over, or the magnitude of what was at stake. Over the next four years, sesquicentennial commemorations will celebrate battles great and small. Re-enactors will march. Museums will mount exhibitions. Scholars will debate why battles were won or lost.


Yet issues once thought to have been settled 150 years ago still resonate as an African-American president sits in the White House, and beliefs in states rights and the nullification of federal law have taken on new vigor. Some politicians, such as Texas Gov. Rick Perry, have even suggested that secession is a reasonable reaction to federal legislation they don't like.

The war's outcome was not a foregone conclusion. Confederate armies were remarkably successful on the battlefield during the first years, and European powers came close to granting the Confederacy diplomatic recognition. As late as 1864, the North was so weary of bloodshed that Abraham Lincoln expected to lose his bid for re-election. Only when Gen. William T. Sherman captured Atlanta on Sept. 2 was the Union's victory made virtually inevitable.


Some of that victory's meanings are obvious. In the mid-19th century, a world of monarchies and dictatorships, it was widely believed that republics were fated to die either from external attack or internal collapse. The North's victory proved the fallacy of such assumptions and established a model for democratic government around the world. By freeing four million enslaved black Americans, it also set the nation on the road to fulfilling the ideals enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. Yet some of the war's most far-reaching consequences have largely been ignored.


Had the Confederacy won its independence, the immediate consequences for African-Americans would have been catastrophic: possible pogroms against self-emancipated blacks who had taken up arms against their former masters, and decades or generations more of slavery for the rest, underpinned by an official racial ideology.


Formal slavery would eventually have come to an end, because it was economically inefficient. But in a nation founded on the permanent control of a huge, despised and feared minority, the Confederate version of "freedom" would doubtless have meant the restriction of blacks to segregated townships and institutionalized repression of blacks and dissident whites.


Although antebellum Southern states were robustly democratic for whites who supported slavery, these same states routinely denied freedom of speech, press and assembly to anyone who opposed it. In contrast to a United States striving to perfect human liberty, the Confederate States would have offered the world a model for racial oppression well into the 20th century.


A triumphant and prosperous Confederacy would probably have carried its borders—and slavery—west to the Pacific Ocean, as it in fact attempted to do in 1862 when a Confederate army invaded New Mexico and was defeated by a scratch federal force near Santa Fe. It would also have attempted to annex or conquer Cuba, other Caribbean islands, northern Mexico and parts of Central America—all of which was openly proposed by pro-slavery expansionists in the 1850s. Declared Mississippi Sen. Albert Gallatin Brown in 1858: "I want Cuba, and I know that sooner or later we must have it . . . I want Tamaulipas, Potosi, and one or two other Mexican States; and I want them all for the same reason—for the planting or spreading of slavery."


With secession established as a precedent, other portions of the United States (and for that matter the Confederacy itself) might well have broken away in reaction to national policies they opposed. In the decade prior to the outbreak of the Civil War, opponents of secession warned that gold-rich California and the rest of the West Coast might also secede. Others feared complete disintegration, with the Midwest, the mid-Atlantic states and New England going their separate ways, creating a congeries of competing or even warring states—a North American "Balkans"—that would fall prey to foreign interference.


What of the truncated United States? In place of the muscular nationalism that sustained the growth of American power in the 20th century, the traumatized North would likely have been left hobbled by a defeatist complex infecting its foreign relations for years afterward. On the other hand, freed from the drag of pro-slavery interests, the North might also have evolved rapidly in the direction of a war-averse social democracy similar to those of 20th century Northern Europe.


These are all speculations. But it is safe to say that there would have been no American colossus to assert its military power and political will, and to intervene on behalf of democracy around the world. Would a diminished United States have entered World War I alongside Britain and France? What might Confederate affinity for German racial policies have meant for the Third Reich? Would either the United States or the Confederacy have dared to confront an expansionist and militarist Japan? If the West Coast states had formed a new nation, neither the U.S. nor the Confederacy would even be a Pacific power.


In the absence of an American superpower, could the West ever have hoped to contain the Soviet Union? One can only imagine.


We may continue to argue whether the Civil War was inevitable or justified: Passions and myths die hard. But in the effort to celebrate our past and honor the dead, we also ought to remember that the war was about much more than the clash of soldiers on the green battlefields of yesteryear, and more than the domestic concerns that are still with us. It was not a world war. But the victory of the Union changed the world, for the better.


Mr. Bordewich is the author of several books, including "Bound for Canaan: The Underground Railroad and the War for the Soul of America" (Amistad, 2006) and "Washington: The Making of the American Capital" (Amistad, 2008).

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